Thursday, April 1

I'm going to make a rare exception and publicly criticize another blogger; that's because I want to quote from his April 1 essay, which a colleague sent me. Rick Moran of The American Thinker wrote that Vladimir Putin's "bloody, inhuman crackdown on separatists in the Caucasus" gave Doku Umarov, the Chechen who confessed yesterday to being the mastermind of the Moscow metro terrorist bombings, "an excuse to carry out his jihad against the west."

Mr Moran quoted Umarov's accusation that Putin was also a terrorist because he ordered murders of civilians. Mr Moran then observed:

In fact, the terrorist is right; Obama and the State Department have soft pedaled Putin's crimes against civilians, hoping not to sidetrack the START treaty. Chechen civilians are paying the price while the world turns the other way so as not to offend Putin and his puppet president Medvedev.

Mr Moran might want to reshuffle his priorities. Right now citizens of the United States of America are aiding the mass murder in Pakistan being carried out by the CIA at the express order of President Barack Obama.

I'm not talking about the UAV drone strikes that have resulted in civilian 'collateral damage,' although the majority of deaths from those strikes in Pakistan have been just that. Many of the UAV strikes have targeted the wrong house or gathering because of faulty intelligence or coordinates, which has added up to many scores or hundreds of civilians killed (the number depending on which estimates are cited) who're not involved with terrorist groups.

I'm talking about premeditated murder, not accidents. So this is going beyond the U.S.-assisted genocide in East Pakistan in 1971; there Washington only provided Pakistan's military with weapons, money, and encouragement to carry out the systematic murder and torture of thousands of civilians. In the present situation the USA is actually pulling the trigger:

Last March [2009], the Obama Administration made an unannounced decision to win support for the drone program inside Pakistan by giving President Asif Ali Zardari more control over whom to target.

“A lot of the targets are nominated by the Pakistanis -- it’s part of the bargain of getting Pakistani coöperation,” says Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who has served as an adviser to the Obama Administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If Mr Moran wants to argue that there's no evidence that the CIA is murdering the Pakistan government's enemies for them, the testimony of history is against him. So it would be up to him to demonstrate when the Pakistan government abandoned their strategy of committing atrocities against civilian populations they find bothersome -- both in Pakistan and India. Reference the 2007 Lal Masjid massacre of hundreds of female students.

Even a cursory reading of the Pakistan military's recent past actions would alert the Obama administration that if President Obama signed an authorization giving Pakistan's government a say in CIA UAV targets, he was committing a crime against humanity, which should be an impeachable offense.

That President Obama did all this simply to placate Pakistan's military, which fought against British-American forces during the invasion of Afghanistan 2001, and has directed the majority of 'Taliban' attacks against ISAF forces in post-invasion Afghanistan, is an outrage so vast it can't be fully conveyed in words.

To top it off the Obama administration has given into pressure from Pakistan's government and directed the Pentagon to sell them surveillance UAV's -- 12, to be exact. The drones are not armed, even though Pakistan is pushing for armed drones. But give Pakistan's military a year or two and they'll figure out how to arm the surveillance drones.

Again, with history as the guide and with no sign of a change in their behavior, you don't want to think about what they plan to do with those drones once they've armed them. Not since the United States allowed a defeated Saddam Hussein to arm helicopters after the Gulf War has there been such a blatant move on our part to abet genocide.

Yet to attempt to place all the blame for this on the Obama administration, or the CIA or the Pentagon, would be sophistry. Americans are not serfs and we do not live in a police state; therefore, every American of voting age who pays taxes shares in the blame.

If Mr Moran wants to say he didn't know, that he wasn't aware of the situations I outlined -- then he might want to spend less time focused on the sins of Vladimir Putin and more time focused on American affairs, including America's client states and in particular Pakistan.

That returns me to yesterday's discussion on this blog about the claim that terrorist networks from the Caucasus have been taking refuge in Georgia's capital city of Tbilisi.

Because Georgia's secret police apparatus is very active, and because doings in the city are under close surveillance by U.S. and British intelligence, not to mention Russian intelligence, the claim is bad news for the USA. It implies that Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili, who is an American-British installed puppet, and the Obama administration, are aware that terror networks are using Tbilisi for a staging area for attacks against Russian civilians.

Yesterday Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, accused Georgia of backing terrorism in the North Caucasus and said that it could be involved in the Moscow Metro terrorist bombings. He came out with the accusation before Umarov confessed his part in the subway bombings and the double terrorist attacks in Dagestan on Wednesday. However, Patrushev's accusation transcends any one terrorist incident:

Mr Patrushev, the former director of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB, singled out Georgia and its pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili after being asked in an interview about possible foreign involvement in the terror attack.

“All theories have to be checked. For example, there is Georgia and the leader of that state, Saakashvili, whose behavior is unpredictable,” Mr Patrushev told the Kommersant newspaper.

“He has already unleashed war once. It is possible that he may unleash it again. We have had information that individual members of Georgian special forces support contacts with terrorist organizations in the Russian North Caucasus. We must check this also in relation to the acts of terror in Moscow.” [...]

Now why must Americans concern themselves with this accusation?

Firstly because Georgia is an American client state, and it's another one of those ghastly client states like Pakistan. Secondly, because Georgia's special forces, which Patrushev pointedly mentioned, received training in the latest techniques from the U.S. military. They could have also received training from Israeli military and for all I know from the British as well. But there is no question that Georgia's military and their various branches received extensive training from U.S. forces. That's why something like a third of their military signed up for a tour in Iraq and Afghanistan. They wanted the crack training the U.S. forces provided.

This is an old story and a very ugly one. During the Cold War the OSS, then the CIA, created a veritable cottage industry out of giving special training to fiends -- or bumpkins who transformed into fiends once they got hold of U.S. training -- and weapons provided by the U.S.

I don't want to hear, 'The Maoists and Soviets did it too.' The way is forward, not back. You can go down the list of the insurgencies that CIA aided or created during the Cold War and the police states the US propped up or created and see that in case after case, the military and intelligence training came back to bite the United States -- and often to bite entire regions of the world.

The cottage industry created a kind of Rube Goldberg machine, whereby peoples with little or no concept of the rule of law used their crack American training to propagate atrocities, which spawned counter-atrocities, which spawned ever more repressive regimes that spawned yet more counter-atrocities, and so it went and here we are today, trying to find Tbilisi on the map.

"What Julia Child did for French cooking, Pundita is doing for foreign policy discussion. She's opened a haute pursuit to ordinary people." - Caesar Rodriguez

"Few bloggers think as deeply as Pundita does. And few have her foresight." - Uppity Woman

"There is no other blogger like Pundita. She has carved a niche - part history and part humint - that makes any essay of hers a thing unto itself. In addition there are the sparkles of her dry wit sprinkled through her work." - Dymphna, Gates of Vienna